Developing for Jira Cloud mobile and desktop clients

Jira Cloud is available on iOS, Android, and Mac with modules available for app developers.

Modules supported

The modules supported by the mobile and desktop apps are:

• Issue glances
• Issue right context panel

Use OAuth 2.0 for authentication

Use the OAuth 2.0 (3LO) context path for API calls. Jira Cloud mobile uses OAuth 2.0 (3LO). OAuth 2.0 (3LO) uses a context path, capturing all HTTP requests using api.atlassian.com/ex/jira/{cloudid}. This process ensures that your app accesses the correct Jira site on mobile. Don’t force your requests or resources through the root of the URL (that is, by querying “/” directly).

Design and testing guidelines

Here are some design guidelines for your apps.

A responsive mobile UI

Ensure that your glance panel, right-context-panels, pop-ups, and modals adapt to large panel sizes and smaller screen sizes. Ensure that your app’s pop-ups, flags, and dialogs are dismissible. The app’s pop-ups, flags, and dialogs must also fit on the screen without obstructing anything underneath.

When using the Atlassian UI components, such as AP.dialog or AP.flag, these components automatically resize to adapt to a mobile form factor. However, you need to ensure the content inside these dialogs looks and functions as you expect. When using custom UI components, use the CSS flexbox property to make sure content resizes and stretches to fit.

Test your app by downloading the iOS or AndroidJira Cloud client and check whether your app renders and behaves as expected on a mobile screen.

A responsive desktop UI

If your app’s UI is mobile responsive, then it should work well on the desktop client. Your app on the glance panel and right-context-panels should automatically fill the glance space in the desktop app.

Test your app, download the Mac Jira Cloud app and check whether your app renders and behaves as expected on a desktop screen.

Hide or show content depending on screen size

Typically, Jira Cloud mobile user use cases involve quick actions: users want to get in, do something quickly, and get back to work. Duplicating complex interactions on diagrams, charts, or graphs from the web may not be appropriate.

Think about mobile use cases and consider turning off features or tweaking features to make them easier to use in smaller screens. Then hide parts of the app when you detect that it is running on a mobile form factor.

Use external links

Links that interact with other elements within Jira don’t work in an app running in the mobile or desktop clients because these clients do not support all the plugin points available on the web. We recommend using external web links instead:

• Normal hyperlinks are supported and open a new browser window on the user’s device.
• iOS universal links and Android app links are supported. Some marketplace apps may want to open other mobile clients, and this is supported.

Tip: To promote your app and encourage downloads, include links to Apple App Store or Google Play Store within your glance.

Customize the experience based on the device

For control over the app experience by devices use:

• the Jira Cloud Developer JS API: The Jira AP.Jira.isNativeApp returns true if a Jira Cloud user is using a native app.
• a library to detect user device: Web frameworks may have libraries that enable detection of the device a user is using, such as OS and device type, not only on mobile but on all devices.